2027 Event Agenda

As distributed energy resource adoption accelerates, utilities are under increasing pressure to process interconnection applications faster while maintaining grid safety, regulatory compliance, and a positive developer experience. ComEd, Exelon, and West Monroe have partnered for more than 12 years to modernize DER interconnection, progressing from foundational process digitization to automation of many aspects of the interconnection process (completeness review, technical review, certificate of completion, and more). This automation journey has already delivered meaningful operational impact, contributing to ComEd work hours available to be redeployed to handling other value-added DER Team work and the increasing volume of customer applications.

This session will highlight the next chapter of that transformation: embedding AI directly into the DER interconnection workflow. In collaboration with Exelon IT, ComEd and West Monroe developed an AI-enabled document intelligence capability within their interconnection platform that analyzes submitted DER files, grades documentation, extracts key information, recommends pass/fail outcomes for supplemental forms, and generates customer-facing messages when issues are identified. The solution processes documents such as site plans, one-line diagrams, battery data sheets, inverter data sheets, meter photos, battery nameplate photos, and micro-inverter files.

The AI pilot went live in early 2026 and has demonstrated more than 87% accuracy in production, while establishing an Exelon-owned platform, architecture, governance model, and monitoring process that will be reused for future AI use cases. The session will share how the team selected the use case, aligned business and IT stakeholders early, defined success metrics, built ground-truth validation with DER interconnection SMEs, and kept "humans in the loop" to ensure transparency, accountability, and continuous improvement.

Attendees will learn practical lessons from moving beyond AI experimentation into production, including why high-quality data matters, how to prioritize pain points before selecting technology, how to monitor non-deterministic model performance, and how utilities can build confidence through KPI-based evaluation. The presentation will also explore ComEd's forward-looking AI roadmap for DER interconnection.

By combining DER expertise, intelligent automation, AI governance, and human-centered design, Exelon is demonstrating how utilities can transform interconnection from a manual bottleneck into a scalable, transparent, and future-ready digital process.